by Ken Hansen
“Sorry, man.” Granger frowned and furrowed his brow deeply. “I’m shipping out tonight.”
“What? Your tour is not up for another six months.”
“Somebody’s gotta pay, even if it’s only internally. My initials. No court martial, but my ass will never see major. I’ll either resign or get tossed out after the next promotion board.”
“Where am I gonna turn? I can’t trust these bastards anymore,” said Anwari.
Granger had just shrugged and shaken his head…
Huxley walked past the security gate at the Carabinieri’s command center and looked for a cab. During the debrief with Patismio, he had struggled through the fuzzy corridors of his mind to give an adequate report without giving away Anwari. He wondered if Patismio had suspected something. Huxley knew he had better wait before tackling Mayer and Blount. In this state, they could squeeze his head until it popped off. He could not afford that, at least not with Mayer’s motives remaining unclear. Even if Mayer were the mole, he still had to find the snake. He called Kira.
“Good to see you’re still alive.”
“Thanks. You OK?”
“Sure. Just keep dancing around Blount and Mayer. I think they are looking to shut down the music, though. You back in business yet?”
“The world is still such a dreamy place. Should I share a few with you?”
“God, no, I don’t want any more of your baggage.”
Huxley laughed. “You find our friend yet?”
“Nope. Italian Immigration confirmed he flew back to Kabul the day after the bombing in Florence. I got nothing else. Sorry.”
“Keep looking. We have to find him.”
“OK, can I—”
“No. No CIA. He’s just a guy, remember.”
“You don’t make it easy.”
“You want easy? I need you to get creative and see if you can come up with any possible leads on a snake from Florence?”
“A snake?” she asked.
“I know. This isn’t easy or I wouldn’t be asking you. Just see if you can find anybody who is originally from Tocelli’s neighborhood and has some nasty personality defect. The term they used was “snake,” so I’m looking for someone who was charged with fraud or corruption or something like that. This snake would have traveled to Israel around the time Tocelli was there. Check criminal and police records, newspaper and magazine articles, whatever. My guess is that the person was somewhat prominent at some point, if that helps. You got that?”
Silence.
“Kira, you still there?”
“Oh I’m here alright,” she said. “I was just wondering if it would be better to feign a bad connection, but then you would just call me back with more impossible requests.”
“Come on, you love a challenge,” he said.
She sighed. “A challenge is climbing Mt. Everest. This is more akin to sprouting wings and flying to the peak.”
“Better get growing those wings, then, so you can start flapping them madly at me. I have faith in you. You’ve worked miracles before. Can’t I have another? I’ll see what I can do to help you out on this one.”
Huxley hung up and found one of his new friends in his contacts list. The man answered, “Mr. Huxley, good to finally hear from you. I was wondering when you would remember your Israeli colleagues. We had an understanding, right?”
The image of Yadin spitting into the microphone, red corpuscles bulging from his forehead, nearly made Huxley laugh, but he held it in.
Yadin shifted to a quiet, soothing tone. “Sorry to hear about the bombing. It was a relief to hear you had come out of it one piece. You gave us a bit of a scare.”
“Aw, Captain, I didn’t know you cared. You keep acting human and I may actually end up liking you.”
“Well, we couldn’t have that, could we?” Captain Yadin cleared his throat. “Anyway, what do you know?”
“Not as much as I would like. We still cannot find any real trace of Tocelli although I think I’m getting closer than someone would like. I did get one snippet of intel that I’m trying to track down, but it feels like a bit of a reach. Tocelli told his sister he had seen a snake from the old neighborhood while he was at Tel Megiddo. We are wondering if that might explain his disappearance.”
“A snake?” Yadin asked.
“You got it. I know it’s not much, but we’d like to cross reference some searches with your immigration database to see if we can find something. We are just looking for Italians in Israel during a three-week period. You game?”
“I think we could send you a partial database to use.” Yadin sighed. “You will, as a good partner in this venture, tell us if you get any results?”
“Of course. Can we do this through normal channels so my assistant can get involved?”
“I don’t see why not. Have her contact me.”
Huxley scratched his head. “You have any more leads on the chemist or his family?”
“Nothing. No ransom notes, no contact. Looks like you may have been right. We need to find him yesterday, but we still have no real clues. Like a ghost nabbed them.”
“That may be right. We think Pardus might be behind this, and he would have removed them from Italy as soon as possible. He may be back in your part of the world.”
“Pardus?” Yadin asked. “You believe in the Ghost Leopard?”
“It’s not a matter of faith, but our inability to find him does not mean he does not exist.” Crap, that sounded way too familiar.
“Can we coordinate on this?” responded Yadin. “You get anything, let us know and we’ll do the same.”
“You got it. Let me ask you something, though. You going for a rescue if you find the chemist?”
“Sure, if we can pull it off quickly and with low risk. Between you and me, Jacob Rosenthal’s brain remains the biggest single threat to the world while he remains alive. I doubt he will learn much from Pardus that would help us if he somehow survives. We would love to save him, but not at the cost of giving the Ghost Leopard more time to succeed.”
“I take it you have what you need from Mr. Rosenthal already?”
Yadin laughed. “Nice try. I love you, but not that much. Anything else?”
“Just one thing since we are on such good terms now. You said a while back that you were not having me tailed. Now, I wouldn’t blame you for not being straight with me given the situation, but it’s critical that I know now whether my tail was sent by you.”
“Of course you were tailed. You were a possible suspect at the time.”
Huxley nodded. “Yeah, look, I don’t need to know the tail’s name, but could you tell me whether he had a black beard?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?” Huxley asked.
“Because I am not aware that she takes any testosterone.”
Chapter 35
Huxley’s knock on Sonatina’s door should have been accompanied by his intense excitement, but the bomb in Florence had changed all that. Now nearly three weeks later, his headache had dissipated, but a slight fog still obscured the lower corners of his mind. He should have waited until it cleared, but she might just raise his spirits when he needed it most. That hope suffered no disappointment when Sonatina opened the door to her apartment and flashed her most welcoming Mediterranean smile.
They ate a real Italian meal, not what you are served in a D.C. restaurant but the kind his mother used to make so many years ago. Risotto and meatballs with pomodoro fresco marinara. “Until tonight, I would not have believed that an artsy gal from Firenze could cook like this,” he said.
“Florence is full of art, that is true, but have you ever eaten there? Buon Appetito!”
He smiled at her obvious pride in her hometown. “Where’d you grow up there?”
She looked down at her food. “Just southeast of Ponte Vecchio.”
After his head jerked up and his eyes widened, she quickly added, “I am sorry my old neighborhood was not so welcoming to you.”
Huxley
raised his voice, “You lived near the Tocellis? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me, Sonatina?”
“Tocelli is a common name in Italy. I never personally knew Dante or even that he lived in my neighborhood. Mi dispiace.”
Even when dessert arrived, Huxley kept fighting to remain engaged. His gut was sending out alarms, but he struggled to focus his troubled brain sufficiently to decode the feeling. After clearing the table, they moved to the divan and sipped some wine. Huxley could not quite bring his thoughts away from the Florentine coincidence. He remembered what Tocelli’s sister had said and decided it was worth a shot. “Can you think of any snakes in your old neighborhood?”
“Mi scusi?”
“Snakes. I know it sounds odd, but apparently Dante Tocelli talked about an old snake from his old neighborhood making an appearance in Israel.”
“I have no idea.”
He watched her as she said this. Had she glanced up to her left even for an instant? Was she hiding something or was his paranoia running wild? “He said perhaps an old snake could change its spots when it molted even though a leopard could not.” Again, he read her face as he said this, but it betrayed nothing.
“Leopard?” she asked. “Do you think that was a reference to Pardus?”
He smiled. “Good question. I’d love to know myself. If we can figure out the identity of the snake from the old neighborhood, then…”
She did not fill in his blank.
Sonatina took a few sips of her wine, sat back and crossed her legs. The hem of her dress inched up the shapely form of her thighs.
Huxley’s eyes focused a little too sharply for a little too long. Was she trying to distract him?
She seemed to notice his glance and smiled gently back at him. “How is your decoding going? Have you figured that out yet?”
“Haven’t had time to focus on it much since the explosion. Too many people to straighten out and too damn many reports to send—you’d think frickin’ Mayer was trying to wear me down with administrative bullshit—and all with my head feeling like an overblown balloon.”
“A balloon?”
“Yeah, since I haven’t been thinking quite straight, I doubted I’d have much luck. A friend gave me an idea before the explosion.”
“A friend? How well do you know him?”
“Very. He’s my old roommate, but now he’s an ambassador—the Ambassador of Peace.”
“Che cosa?”
“Nothing—an inside joke. Kadir said I should think about Muslims and the Qur’an. He may be right, since the other clues involved Judaism and Christianity. It seems like a natural progression—just like history, in fact.”
“Well, what is the problem, then? See what you can find in the Qur’an.”
“It sounds easy, doesn’t it? The Qur’an is a big book, though. You want to help? I doubt my faculties are up to it yet, but maybe you can make sense of it.” He pulled out his phone and brought up the poem:
Just take a look at her—do not believe
The Word begot from altar writers past.
We do believe, but just the simple Truth.
We pray within The bawd, where only He
Did soar so high above three centuries.
Now cherish deep within our words of Lord
The times her forlorn shrine has been restored:
The main lies here all split apart in two,
While source of thee doth hold a simpler view.
He looked at it and then at her, shaking his head. Her mere presence had already triggered new ideas in his brain. “Crap, I have been a confused fool. Look, the words on the altar at the Church of the Annunciation are translated from the Latin to: ‘Here the Word was made flesh.’ I thought it was simply that the Orthodox Church that did not believe the words on the altar, since they did not agree that the Annunciation happened at Mary’s home. But it wasn’t about the word “Here,” it was about the entire statement on the altar. The Muslims believe Jesus was an important prophet, but not the Son of God. So they do not believe he is the ‘Word.’ And they praise Mary in the Arabic “Maryam” in the Qur’an itself. Do you have a laptop handy?”
“Si.” She returned a few moments later from her bedroom with a MacBook Pro.
“Find an online copy of the Qur’an and then look up ‘Mary’ and ‘Maryam.’”
Sonatina followed his directions and thirty seconds later the words flashed in English on the screen. “Look,” she said, “there is a whole chapter on Mary—Chapter 19.”
“It is called a ‘Sura’ by Muslims—Sura 19.” They began reading the Sura quickly. It contained something familiar to them both—the story of God sending his angel to Mary with something akin to the Annunciation:
[H]e said, ‘I am but a Messenger from your Lord, come to announce to you the gift of a pure son.’ She said, ‘How can I have a son when no man has touched me? I have not been unchaste,’ and he said, ‘This is what your Lord said: “It is easy for Me—We shall make him a sign to all people, a blessing from Us.”’ And so it was ordained: she conceived him.
A few paragraphs later, they read about how others chastised Mary when she returned with a child. They declared her unchaste and were about to shun her. She pointed at the infant Jesus, suggesting the crowd speak with him. After the others asked how they could possibly converse with an infant, the infant himself began to speak, saying:
I am a servant of God. He has granted me the Scripture; made me a prophet; made me blessed wherever I may be. He commanded me to pray, to give alms as long as I live, to cherish my mother. He did not make me domineering or graceless. Peace was on me the day I was born, and will be on me the day I die and the day I am raised to life again.
Other than giving the infant the power of speech and calling him a prophet, the reading could have been out of the New Testament, even to the point of discussing the day he would be “raised to life again.” But then they read on and the distinction and language of the poem became clear:
This is a statement of the Truth about which they are in doubt: it would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that: when He decrees something, He says only, “Be,” and it is. “God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him: that is a straight path.”
Sonatina gasped. “Did you notice that Truth is capitalized in both the Qur’an and poem? This ‘Truth’ must be the ‘simple Truth.’ While they believe that God worked through Mary and Jesus, they do not believe he is the Son of God, so he could not have been the Word made into flesh as the altar writers had written. You have found your answer.”
Huxley’s smile quickly turned to a grimace. “Yes, my friend was right about the Qur’an, but what can I make of the rest of this poem. There is nothing in this Sura about “The bawd” or anything that “soars above for three centuries.”
Sonatina’s eyes widened and her smile beamed a ray of sunshine on him. “But you said yourself that it would have to be a place relating to Muslims. It says they, that is the Muslims, pray within the bawd, so it must be an Islamic mosque.”
Huxley sat up straight, his grimace returning slowly to a grin. “Of course. Yes, you must be right. And maybe it was one of the tallest mosques for three centuries. But what is a bawd? And notice that “bawd” is preceded by an improperly capitalized ‘The.’ It must be a proper name that begins with some form of ‘the.’ Look up ‘bawd’ in the dictionary. I think I know the word if it is the root of ‘bawdy,’ but let’s see.” Seconds later, Huxley added, “Yep, it is a prostitute, a whore. But what can that possibly have to do with an Islamic mosque?”
“I don’t know. Let’s see,” she said, “‘The prostitute,’ or ‘The whore,’ or maybe ‘The madam.’ You’re right, none of them seems to make any sense. Could it be that we must translate it into another language? Arabic, maybe? Do you know any Arabic?”
Huxley nodded. It makes no sense there either.” Damn muddled brain. He yearned for the old quick connections that now seemed to evade him.
Sonatina came up wi
th another angle: “What if we search the Internet for key terms and see what we get. She began saying each search phrase aloud as she entered them: “‘Let’s try… ‘Three centuries,’ ‘three hundred years,’ ‘Muslim mosque,’ ‘largest,’ ‘biggest,’ ‘tallest,’ ‘highest,’…there.” She pushed enter. Several entries came up of Muslim mosques, including the largest mosque in the world, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They could find nothing that referred to three centuries or anything that could possibly relate to “The bawd.”
Huxley sighed. “Well, it was a nice try, Sonatina. I think we’ll have to sift through these to see if there is anything that could match. Wait, here is an entry on the 15 most fabulous Muslim mosques in the world. Let’s start there.” The article was nearly 10 webpages long, and he was impatient, so he began scanning the top of each mosque description until he came to the twelfth entry entitled: “Badshahi Mosque, or ‘Royal Mosque,’ in Lahore Pakistan.” He looked at Sonatina, “Could it be that simple? ‘La’ is Spanish for ‘The,’ so ‘The bawd,’ or ‘The whore’ becomes ‘Lahore?’”
They read on and found the answer a few sentences below:
Able to hold 10,000 worshippers in the main prayer hall, with another 100,000 in the courtyard, the Badshahi Mosque was the largest mosque in the world from 1673 to 1986 (a period of 313 years).
Huxley looked at Sonatina with a ridiculous grin on his face. She returned the joy by flashing a soft, alluring smile. He could not resist. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him, feeling her well-formed breasts against his chest. She squeezed back and it triggered something else in his body chemistry that he had missed for a long time. He rubbed her back and shoulders gently and whispered in her ear, “You are as much a genius as you are beautiful, Sonatina. Grazie.”
She returned the whisper, “Glad I could help, but it was all you, Chris, and you are pretty gentle on the eyes yourself.”
